CATER - Mass Customization in the Automotive Industry: New European Project Wants to Shift Auto Customization to a New Level

Free Workshop in Nice Will Present First Results on Sept. 11, 2007

CATER is a 3-year collaborative research project launched in September 2006 and supported by the European Commission aiming at developing innovative ICT tools and methods for mass customization of vehicles as well as new approaches to automotive design principles. The research consortium includes 14 major European and Asian organizations in the field ranging from vehicle manufacturers (VOLVO, FIAT), OEMs (IC:IDO, Imartis, etc.) to research centres and universities (Fraunhofer, CERTH, University of Nottingham, Nanyang Technological University, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, etc.).

CATER introduces systems and methodologies that go beyond the traditional approaches of automotive OEMs and in which design is driven by cross-cultural and emotional aspects of customer needs. This is enabled through integration of innovative ideas from diverse expertise of both Europe and Asia. The project also advocates networked business in the automotive field, aiming at a better integration of stakeholders (from OEMs to customers) within the supply chain, to support product planners and designers; while the customers can design their own vehicle via a VR interface in a 3D Web environment.

The image on the left illustrates the various expected benefits brought by CATER to the different stakeholders (click for full scale).

To reach its overall objective of enhancing MC in the automotive industry, CATER will develop according to its work program (see second picture on the left):

“- A semantic notation system, used by engineering teams addressing customers citarasa (Note: Citarasa is a Malay term that refers to emotional intent and aspirations).

- A citarasa engineering methodology, involving elicitation of customer expertise and citarasa in vehicle purchase, and mapping these to vehicle design by concurrent engineering team.

- A teardown database for product development & benchmark for both manufacturers & suppliers.

- A ‘Do-it-Yourself’ design system, powered by citarasa to support customers’ configuration tasks.

- A database architecture based on the previous components supporting the n-business paradigm.”

The CATER workshop

CATER is organizing its first dissemination workshop on September 11, 2007 in Nice (France) to present its first results as well as discuss the state-of-the-art in mass customization of vehicles.

Speakers from the automotive industry will introduce their views in the workshop with regard to new design and vehicle customization principles while several innovative aspects of the CATER project will be presented, such as: the Citarasa Engineering Approach (emotional design concepts), the Web Based Do-it-Yourself-Design system for self-customization of vehicles and VR Interfaces for the customers and the automotive manufacturers product planners, which are the main objectives of the project.

Participation is free but pre-registrations are compulsory.

Note: The MCPC 2007 conference at MIT in October 2007 also will feature a special track on mass customization in the automotive industry, including a presentation on this project.